The Communicating Multi-Polar World

I remember a couple of years ago that if you turned on the TV when travelling you'd get pretty much the same list of stations. It would be a couple of local ones, BBC, CNN, then something French or Italian and that would be it - maybe a dozen in total.

However in Baku there were 700ish stations with representatives of at least the following countries (there were certaintly more as many were using non-Latin script):

• Afganistan
• Algeria
• Armenia
• Azerbaijan
• Benelux
• Britain
• Bulgaria
• China
• Cyprus
• Czech Republic
• Egypt
• France
• Germany
• Greece
• Hungary
• India
• Iran
• Italy
• Japan
• Jordan
• Kazakhstan
• Kurdistan
• Kuwait
• Libya
• Macedonia
• Morocco
• Oman
• Poland
• Portugal
• Qatar
• Romania
• Russia
• Saudi Arabia
• Serbia
• Spain
• Sri Lanka
• Sudan
• Syria
• The Netherlands
• Turkey
• UAE
• USA

Communication is no longer from the West to the developing countries but a matrix from everyone to everyone. The multi-polar world is here, but that message is not one that would be welcomed in some places (Fox News springs to mind).

But travelling brings home the reality: not just that power is shifting, but that power has shifted.



(The building in the pic above is the Azerbaijan National Library, the Akhundov Kitabxana)